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Open Letter to Small Business – Don’t Waste Your Website!

The company website is the most underutilized asset in small business…

…with the greatest opportunity to help the business scale

…and reintroduce slack (time) into the business owner’s life.

The company website should be a growth engine that qualifies, disqualifies, educates, collects, nurtures, converts and ascends your customers into advocacy and promotion.

Stop spending 10s of 1,000s of dollars on a pretty website!

I mean, everyone loves a pretty website. We do too. And we make our clients pretty websites.

But if that is your focus (and it is of many web developers), then you are missing the point.

Your focus shouldn’t be on “how it looks”. It should be on “what it does”.

Websites are meant to help companies do business. And optimally they should help you do it in an automated way that saves you time and increases profitability.

This goes down to how the site itself looks/works, how it integrates to your other business platforms and how it is built to support your business goals.

Doing Business

And what does that mean? Doing business…

Well, your website should do specific things that bring tangible benefit to the company.

It should provide measurable value in forms of:

Education

Qualification/Disqualification

Strategic Lead Capture

Prospect Conversion

Sales Ascension

Customer Advocacy

To do this, websites need work to harmoniously with other company platforms to grab the visitor and lead them through your defined customer journey.

We come from a different background.

We have been helping companies do business through implementing smart technology for 16 years. We started on the CRM side in 2001 and have helped companies like NYSE, AIG, United Blood System, etc. implement technology to support and automate the “doing of business”.

We have been WordPress devs for almost 10 years.

And we have been working with our small business CRM and marketing automation platform for almost 10 years too. In fact, we helped that company, Infusionsoft, launch their partner channel by writing their training curriculum and training the first partner certification classes for them.

So we approach websites from a bit of a different paradigm.

How It Should Work

Websites need to be designed to attract, nurture, and convert your ideal clients. And that doesn’t just mean the way it looks.

It includes all of the back end functionality – showing your content in a specific way, enabling lead collection using best practices, ascending people through your various offers in a natural way (your funnel), and supporting them as they take the time to make those decisions (integrated email marketing).

With the integrated CRM that we use, we always know where people are in the customer journey and can automatically send them the right messages for the stage they are in (and stop sending them the wrong messages based on their behavior or lack of behavior).

What Do You Have to Do?

So how does all of this look for you?

How do you know if you have what it takes to drive one of these growth engines?

In order to make this approach work for your company, you really have to be open to one particular thing ongoing.

You have to be open to producing strategic content.

Once these growth engines are in place, we add traffic. And the best way to get traffic is to produce excellent content (blog posts, videos, podcasts, white papers, social media posts). And then as you produce that content, you can drive traffic to it with social media and strategic ads.

Now a lot of business owners think that they don’t need to be producing content. Nobody would care.

And you only need to be producing strategic content that speaks to the problems of those ideal customers – so it’s very specific. And knowing what it should be makes that part so much easier.

If you are open to producing content, then we can help you build a growth machine around your business. Using your website, we can automate lead generation, qualification/disqualification, conversion and advocacy.

One More Thing On Pretty

So we probably shouldn’t even be mentioning this but we see so many websites that are pretty only on the front end.

To us, it’s even MORE important that websites are “pretty” on the back end – architected correctly, using trusted, curated plugins, built with theming that supports the business functionality working together.

With the low barrier to entry of WordPress, there are a lot of folks out there passing themselves off as WordPress devs that may be able to cobble something together that looks ok from the front end.

How it works on the back end is even more important when you realize that your website is really meant to “do business”.

Why Do It?

Well when you get this all going, you will see:

Increased leads

Increased conversions

Higher lifetime customer value

And all with less ongoing time invested

If you understand that your website is one of the company’s primary business driving assets, it changes the game.

And if you’re not taking advantage of that the opportunity cost is tremendous.